A paper that explores the unlikely coupling of warm wine and the electric properties of iron is currently making its rounds on the media circuit—leading us to conclude that people get excited about science when there is alcohol involved.
“Drunk scientists pour wine on superconductors and make incredibly discovery,” declares the (slightly inaccurate) headline on io9. “’Tis the season to be pickling your liver in alcohol,” announces the (slightly irrelevant) opening line of a CNET article.
The researchers’ experiment—led by Keita Deguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan—involved first submersing an iron alloy in various hot alcoholic beverages, and then finding the temperature at which the treated alloy starts to display superconducting properties. A superconductor is a material that has no electrical resistivity, allowing electrons to flow through it with essentially zero friction.
The paper abstract, which was published on arXiv, gives an overview of the experiment’s findings and method (although there’s no mention of beverage consumption that might have inspired these scientific antics):
“We found that hot commercial alcohol drinks are much effective to induce superconductivity in FeTe0.8S0.2 compared to water, ethanol and water-ethanol mixture…. Any elements in alcohol drinks, other than water and ethanol, would play an important role to induce superconductivity.”
(more…)
A new study out in the American Association of Wine Economist’s “Wine Economics” journal suggests that monogamous societies are bigger drinkers than those in polygamous societies. Does this mean that being stuck with only one partner drives us to the bottle, or does drinking make us more likely to settle down?
Actually the answer is most likely neither. Both monogamy and drunkenness seem to be related to economics, or at least, that’s why both seem to have blossomed during the industrial revolution. Jo Swinnen, one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times Freakonomics blog (which seemed to have missed the actual conclusion of the study) that he noticed the correlation over, unsurprisingly, a glass of wine:
The inspiration came from a casual observation (over a glass of wine) that the two social/religious groups that do allow polygamy ((parts of) Mormonism and Islam) also do not consume alcohol. So we wondered whether this was a coincidence or not.
While many studies have compared alcohol and cultural traits, this is the study to look at its relationship with polygamy. The researchers compared the marital style and “frequency of drunkenness” of 44 well-documented pre-industrial societies (24 of which were polygamous; 20 monogamous) and found that monogamy was indeed positively correlated with drunkenness. The paper (pdf) says:
(more…)
Drunk fights are a typical occurrence at some bars–but why does drinking make us more likely to fight? Kate Shaw over at Ars Technica gives us a good example of a typical confrontation:
If you’ve ever had one (or ten) too many drinks at a bar, you’re probably familiar with this scenario: a drunk guy stumbles past you, spills a beer all over you, and you get angry. You’re convinced he did it on purpose, and you start fuming.
New research from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that this “thinking he did it on purpose” is because alcohol makes you likely to interpret someone’s actions as intentional rather than accidental. In a bar situation, this can translate to a conviction that an offending act was aimed specifically at you–great, so alcohol essentially brings out the paranoid narcissist in all of us.
(more…)
By Katie Palmer
“Not all chemicals are bad,” wrote humor columnist Dave Barry. “Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.” Barry may have been right about the virtues of a cold one, but his description is missing a few chemicals: the proteins from beer’s other main ingredients, starch (often from barley) and yeast.
To better understand this intoxicating chemical recipe, researchers at the University of Milan have published an expanded proteome, or protein library, of their lager of choice in the Journal of Proteome Research. They used a method called combinatorial peptide ligand libraries, or CPLL, which involves running the beer through sticky beads to capture its proteins—even the ones that present at low levels. They turned up 20 proteins from barley, 40 from yeast and two from corn, a vast improvement on the previous proteome, which showed just 12 barley and two yeast proteins.
So is there any good reason for the art of beer brewing to become a science? According to the researchers, better knowledge of the proteins that survive brewing could help improve flavor, aroma, and retention of the foamy head so prized by beer drinkers. While brewmasters can control taste by using different starches, yeasts and varieties of hops, they could refine their craft even further by designing fermentation processes to increase or minimize the release of specific yeast proteins. Sounds good, just as long as they don’t expect anyone to wait around empty-glassed while they figure it out.
This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Space Tourists Will Get Their Own Special Space Beer
Discoblog: Honoring St. Patrick: Guinness Bubbles Demystified and Why Your Hangover Hurts
Discoblog: Conservation and Boozing Collide: Turning Rainwater Into Beer
80beats: Accidental Awesomeness: Ancient Nubians Made Antibiotic Beer
Image: iStockphoto
Beef, butter sculptures, and people byproducts have made for some good biofuels. Now Scottish researchers are looking to whisky. Processing whisky waste–pot ale, the liquid in copper stills, and draff, leftovers from grain–researchers at Edinburgh Napier University have created butanol which they claim can provide 25 percent more energy per unit volume than ethanol, a more typical biofuel.
Martin Tangney, project director, told The Guardian that every country should use its own particular brand of waste instead of growing crops for biofuels:
“What people need to do is stop thinking ‘either or’; people need to stop thinking like for like substitution for oil. That’s not going to happen. Different things will be needed in different countries.”
In Scotland’s case those things include the leftovers from a stiff drink. The country’s estimated six billion dollar whisky industry produces 1,600 million liters of pot ale and 187,000 tons of draff annually. In America’s case, perhaps we should instead turn to human fat?
Sugar fermentation makes the conversion from leftovers to butanol possible, and researchers say cars could use the fuel without modifying their engines by using a mixture of butanol and gasoline.
Related content:
Discoblog: Rancid Butter Sculptures: A Great Untapped Biofuel Source?
Discoblog: All Aboard the Beef Train–Amtrak Debuts a Train Running on Beef Biofuel
Discoblog: Dr. 90210 Powers SUV with Liposuctioned Fat
Discoblog: Finally! A Self-Sustaining, Sewage-Processing, Poop-Powered Rocket
Discoblog: This Poop Mobile Could Get All Its Energy From 70 Homes’ Worth of Methane
Image: flickr / foxypar4
Mice might turn up their noses at alcohol, but not the prairie vole. This usually upstanding rodent, famous for mating for life and sharing pup-raising duties, apparently likes a stiff drink.
“They not only drink alcohol, they prefer it over water,” Allison Anacker, a neuroscience graduate student at Oregon Health & Science University told The Oregonian.
Anacker, working under behavioral neuroscience professor Andrey Ryabinin, was looking for a model organism to study some humans’ troubled relationship with alcohol. Mice and rats fail in this role–it’s unusual to find ones that want even a sip of the stuff.
In a study published in Addiction Biology last month, Ryabinin’s team records the drunken misadventures of prairie voles. After chugging their preferred 6 percent alcohol drink (about the equivalent of beer), some thirsty voles shoved off parental responsibilities and even walked out on their mates. Though some drank responsibility, others drank to excess, stumbling away from the bar/spiked water bottle.
The study suggests that like humans, the voles also make drinking buddies, seemingly encouraging each other to have another. When caged together, the voles appear to match one another drink for drink, a practice that apparently has nothing to do with who’s buying the next round.
Related content:
Discoblog: “Drunk” Parrots Fall From the Trees in Australia
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Anticipated versus actual alcohol consumption during 21st birthday celebrations.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Beer Consumption Increases Human Attractiveness to Malaria Mosquitoes.
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Pocket science – sperm races and poison-stealing voles
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Of voles and men: exploring the genetics of commitment
Image: flickr / Gilles Gonthier / field vole
Stolichnaya or Grey Goose, martinis shaken or stirred: Everybody’s got a preference. Vodka may not taste like much—in industry terms, it’s neutral—but any bartender can tell you about the fierce partisanship its different types inspire. This division among drinkers, a new study suggests, could be a result of slight differences in the vodkas’ molecular structure.
Vodka is about 60 percent water by volume, and 40 percent ethanol, an alcohol. The water and ethanol naturally mingle in such close quarters, and some of the molecules stick together in interesting ways.
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Moscow State University compared the chemical composition of five common brands—Belvedere, Grey Goose, Oval, Skyy, and Stolichnaya—to see if those water-ethanol groupings always happen the same way. They found that two of the vodkas had a higher concentration a certain cage-like chemical structure, in which five or so molecules of water surround each ethanol molecule. This difference, the researchers say, might explain our preferences for one brand over another. It’s even possible that the act of shaking a vodka martini breaks up those cage structures.
It’s not clear if such a subtle change in molecular make-up could affect taste, or even that those cage-like structures hold together long enough to have much of an impact at all. So for now, it may be wise to take this explanation with a grain of salt—and, while you’re at it, maybe a few olives.
– by Valerie Ross
Related Content:
Discoblog: How to Tell a Fine Old Wine: Look for That Hint of Radioactive C-14
Discoblog: Each Shot of Mezcal Contains a Little Bit of DNA From the “Worm”
80beats: Science Explains: Why You Can’t Drink Red Wine With Fish
80beats: Fabulous Fizz: How Bubbles Make Champagne Burst With Flavor
Image: flickr / paPisc
The town of Palmerston, Australia is now the unwilling host of a parrot frat party. Hundreds of lorikeets appear to be drunk: The disoriented birds are passing out cold and falling from tree branches.
Though seemingly inebriated parrots have been spotted before in Palmerston, never has the town seen this many at once. The situation concerns veterinarians, since the birds are injuring themselves, and, untreated, could die.
About eight lorikeets arrive each day to the Ark Animal Hospital, which cares for about thirty at a time. “They definitely seem like they’re drunk,” Lisa Hansen, a veterinary surgeon at the hospital told the the AFP. “They fall out of trees… and they’re not so coordinated as they would normally be. They go to jump and they miss the next perch.” Hansen and colleagues nurses them to health by feeding them a “hangover” broth that includes sweet fruit.
Literally drunk parrots have appeared in other parts of the world, for example in Austria in 2006, when birds ate rotting, fermenting berries. This time the inebriated birds remain a mystery: Some locals speculate that the birds are feasting on something something alcoholic, but others fear they have caught an unknown illness.
Related content:
DISCOVER: A New Source of Terror: Drunk Birds
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Alex the parrot and Snowball the cockatoo show that birds can dance
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Drunken monkeys reveal how binge-drinking harms the adolescent brain
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Tiny treeshrews chug alcoholic nectar without getting drunk
Discoblog: Animal Heroics: Parrot Honored for Saving Choking Baby
Image: Wikimedia Commons / Mats Lindh
Imagine dropping a few hundred dollars for a bottle of “premium wine” only to discover it tastes like plonk! For years, collectors of fine wines have gone to great lengths to ensure that the wine they buy is indeed of the advertised quality and age. From tamper-proof caps to prevent the dilution of a premium wine with cheap stuff to an electric tongue that can distinguish fine wines, connoisseurs have tried their best not to get ripped off. Now, they have another trick at their disposal, and this one involves an atom bomb.
According to new research, collectors can avoid purchasing a faked bottle of an old vintage by running the wine through a “bomb pulse” test, which uses the radioactive material present in air to date the wine. The system is accurate enough, say scientists, to date your wine’s vintage up to a year of its production–so that a collector can be certain, for example, that a Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1982 isn’t actually a child of the aughts.
(more…)
Oh, St. Patrick’s Day! Somehow it has become the day of binge drinking, day of doing shots, and the day before contemplating why you spent the last 24 hours drinking your head off. Nonetheless, St. Paddy must be honored, and honor him we shall—with alcohol and some science.
We decided to reach into the past and pull out the wondrous mystery of the Guinness beer bubbles. For years, the mysterious downward flowing Guinness bubbles have confounded both professional scientists and drinkers. When the bartender pulls a pint of most any beer, the bubbles can clearly be seen gushing to the top. When a pint of Guinness is poured, however, the bubbles slyly cascade down the sides of the glass, while the beer mysteriously maintains its frothy layer on top.
So in 2004, scientists Andy Alexander from the Royal Society of Chemistry and Dick Zare of Stanford University decided to find out why the bubbles act the way they do. After preliminary research trips to the local pub proved unfruitful, they decided to move the scene to a lab where they rigged a high-speed camera to take pictures of the Guinness being poured. The camera could zoom in and magnify the images ten times.
(more…)
